


Small Talker

by stiction



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: (sort of), Crack Treated Seriously, Cybertronian Facebook, Gen, Jazz/Prowl if you squint (and i'm squinting), M/M, Post-Dark Cybertron, this human emotion called friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:14:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22822345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: “I see your point,” Prowl said finally. There was a legitimate concern hidden in this, the childishness aside: he would accomplish nothing if he didn’t rehabilitate his image. Nobody wanted to follow a mech on the brink of losing it.“Just… try and chat about something other than politics occasionally, alright? Once a day, at least,” Ratchet said.“Small talk,” Prowl repeated. How hard could it be?
Relationships: Jazz/Prowl
Comments: 7
Kudos: 133





	Small Talker

**Author's Note:**

  * For [crimsonseekers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/crimsonseekers/gifts).



> happy birthday crimson! i appreciate your affinity for prowl and offer this at the prowl altar (the prowltar if you will)

“You can’t be serious.”

“Positive social interaction lowers your risk of spark shrinkage,” Ratchet said, ticking his fingers. “It’s been shown to decrease fuel pump strain. It strengthens your emotional subroutines when you experience an emotion other than ‘anger’ and ‘rage’.”

“Oh, like mild frustration?” Prowl asked. The emotion he was experiencing had gone past irritation and was sliding into the Wrath portion of the spectrum. “I doubt I’m missing much.” 

Ratchet set his scanner down and rubbed his hands into his optics. Prowl stared at those hands, his tacnet chewing on the logistical possibility of whether or not those really _were_ Pharma’s hands. 

It would be stupid if they were, but so was everything that had happened over the last few quartices and counting. And, apparently, everything that had happened on or around the _Lost Light_ since its fateful departure. 

“Listen to me,” Ratchet sighed, and Prowl shunted his calculations to the background. “I’m tossing you a hubcap here, Prowl. If you haven’t noticed, you’re not exactly in anyone’s good graces these days. You just spent a ridiculous amount of time under Decepticon control, but from what I’ve gathered in the literal _two orn_ I’ve been back, you’ve been crashing for much longer than that. Optimus is trusting you with this trial, but even he's starting to have doubts.”

“And making _small talk_ is going to convince the people that I’m on the level?” 

Ratchet picked up a datapad and leaned back against the medberth opposite Prowl. His hands--Prowl’s tacnet reported that the finger structure matched Pharma’s last known specs with 94.3% certainty--tapped restlessly through whatever he was looking at. “Here,” he said finally, holding the screen up for Prowl to read. 

Prowl studied it closely. 

“What the Pit am I looking at?”

Ratchet, to his credit, looked like he was experiencing several stages of grief. “Something one of the kids on board made up. Some kind of rating system for the bots on the ship. It was supposed to help the crew get to know each other, and ended up being more of a popularity contest. Since we landed, the ones who haven’t forgotten about it have been adding mechs left and right.”

Prowl took the datapad. “And?”

“And you officially have the lowest rating on the whole site.”

“ _And?_ Why am I supposed to care about this?”

“Your rating is lower than Whirl. Whirl,” Ratchet repeated. “He’s got one star and three friends.”

“I have a half of a star,” Prowl said, jabbing his finger at the screen. “And it’s barely been up on Cybertron.”

Ratchet sighed again. “It’s a glitch. The system won’t let mechs have zero stars.”

“Some system,” Prowl grumbled. “And why did they choose that datacapture? I look insane.”

Ratchet muttered something that sounded like ‘got your good side, too’. Prowl ignored it and set the datapad down. 

The simmering anger in his processor threatened to boil over, and he forced it back. There was a legitimate concern hidden in this, the childishness aside: he would accomplish nothing if he didn’t rehabilitate his image. Nobody wanted to follow a mech on the brink of losing it. Shockwave had secretly lost it millennia ago, and look where that had gotten Cybertron. Infested with aliens and very nearly destroyed.

“I see your point,” he said finally. 

Ratchet nodded, looking suddenly awkward. “Just… try and chat about something other than politics occasionally, alright? Once a day, at least.” 

“Small talk,” Prowl repeated. How hard could it be?

“You could start with your new gestalt,” Ratchet said, raising his brows with an inscrutable look. 

Prowl’s engine growled.

* * *

He did not, in fact, start with the five clowns that called themselves his gestalt mates. As he crossed the main plaza between the makeshift medbays and his habsuite, a flash of fresh red paint caught his optics. 

Arcee was standing with an unfamiliar mech on the steps of command headquarters. She looked different, aside from the still-novel frame, and Prowl at last pegged the change: she looked relaxed. Closer to happy than he’d ever really seen. 

He talked to Arcee on a regular basis. Granted, that was more in the realm of giving orders, but there was nothing stopping him from talking to her casually as well.

The mech she was with saw him coming first and leaned in to say something to Arcee. She turned, and he watched as her posture straightened and her hand dropped to the hilt of her sword. 

This was probably a mistake. 

He kept walking. It was foolish to stop now. His tacnet calculated a 4.7% chance that she would try to fight him, but a 49.5% chance of his survival if she chose to. He stopped a step below them to be safe.

“Need something?” she asked. 

“Arcee,” he said, inclining his helm. “How are you?”

Arcee stared at him. And kept staring. Her field was scrambled, but he was familiar with the look in her optics.

It went on long enough that the other mech looked uneasily between the two of them before resetting her vocalizer. She extended a hand past Arcee. “Uh, I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Chromia.”

“Prowl,” he said, clasping her hand and finally connecting her to the trio of Camiens that had arrived mid-apocalypse. “Are you… enjoying Cybertron so far?”

“In between crises, sure. It’s a little rustic for my tastes, but I heard there was some reformatting recently.”

Her field was open, if not particularly warm. He hazarded a joke. “You could call it a work in progress.” 

Chromia smiled faintly and shook her head. “Windblade’s called it something similar. The other orn she--”

“I’m sorry,” Arcee interrupted. “How _am_ I?”

Prowl glanced at Chromia, who was looking between them again. 

He cleared his vocalizer. “Yes, I--”

“What are you trying to do?” Arcee asked. 

“Oh, would you look at the time,” Chromia said suddenly. Her hand flew to the side of her helm. “Windblade’s comming me about a meeting, so, uh, great to meet you, Prowl, and Arcee, I’ll see you later about sparring, so... bye.” 

She turned on her heel, walking a few quick steps past the bottom of the steps before she seemed to remember she could transform. She peeled out down the road and left Prowl feeling pinned by Arcee’s suspicious glare. 

“What are you trying to do?” Arcee asked again. 

“I’m trying to have a civil conversation,” Prowl said. He would not lose his temper on the first try. Maybe… Arcee preferred banter over small talk? He tried it out: “Ever heard of it?”

Her hand snapped out to grip his chin faster than he could stop. She tilted his helm back, rolling it from side to side as she checked his neck cables, which were pinched again and again between his helm and his armor. As if Ratchet wouldn't have found another cerebroshell. Prowl grit his dentae and endured.

Arcee was frowning when she let go. 

“Civil doesn’t really suit you.” 

She stepped to the side and walked down the stairs, leaving him alone.

“That bodes well,” Prowl muttered to himself. He looked up at the high balcony Starscream had taken to using for speeches. The banner was mostly burned away. 

It was odd that Starscream hadn’t had it repaired or replaced yet. With the trial approaching, it was possible he had focused his attention on less frivolous tasks. 

Possible, but not likely. 

Prowl watched the mesh flap limply in the breeze. 

It was… worth a try, he supposed.

* * *

Getting to Starscream’s office was remarkably easy. 

The door was already standing half-open. Through the gap Prowl could see Starscream in front of a tall mirror, his wings flexing as he turned to the side. He… he’d had his frame repainted. 

So much for less frivolous tasks. 

Starscream jumped when Prowl knocked, whipping around and bumping into a pedestal of what looked like crowns. They clattered to the floor in a heap of gold and gems. Definitely crowns. What was he even _doing_ here. 

“Oh, it’s _you_ ,” Starscream sneered. His wings were still hiked high. “What do you want?”

“I came… to see how you were doing,” Prowl said. Essentially just another version of ‘how are you’, yes, but Crystal City hadn’t been built in a day.

Starscream’s face twisted into an almost comically ugly mask. “You--what?”

“With the trial approaching--” Prowl said, stopping with a frustrated hitch in his processor. This was politics. He was doing politics again. Starscream’s wings were frozen in the defensive posture. He could do this. “Your new paint looks… nice.”

He could not do this.

Starscream laughed. Starscream kept laughing, to the point that Prowl sorely wanted to leave. 

At last Starscream wound down, his fans working audibly as he wiped at the condensation in his vents. “Oh,” he gasped. “Oh, that’s--that’s just…” 

Prowl forced his mouth to make an expression other than a grimace. “I apologize if I made you uncomfortable.”

That nearly set Starscream off again with a sputter of “Unc-comfor--uncomfortable!” But he vented deeply and visibly tried to stop smirking as he looked at Prowl with a very different expression. “Prowl,” he said. “Prowl.”

“Yes?”

“Were you hitting on me?”

“I--” His tacnet fully shorted out. He couldn’t tell if the whine he was hearing was coming from the rebooting module or his own vocalizer.

Luckily, it didn’t seem that Starscream was waiting for a response. He had dissolved into laughter again, his frame falling against his desk. 

Prowl stood and watched. He was simultaneously very aware of his failure and, without the tacnet, struggling to figure out a non-violent end to the conversation.

“Oh, Primus,” Starscream said, wiping even more condensation from his frame. “Oh, that _was_ good. You should go.” He waved a hand toward the door. “Get out of here before you ruin this perfect moment.”

“Good talk, Starscream,” Prowl said, and left.

* * *

“No,” Kup said. 

Prowl stopped in the doorway. He could feel a twitch developing in his doorwings. “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

“I don’t. And I don’t want to.” 

Prowl hesitated until Kup, slowly reloading a blaster, leveled him with a sidelong look. 

“I’ll talk to you later,” Prowl said. 

“Don’t bother.”

* * *

“Aw, hey, boss! Good of you to visit.” 

“Prowl’s here!”

“You workin’ on anything these days?”

“Come on, come in, we snagged some engex off that mouthy little guy--!”

Prowl ended up herded into a makeshift chair, a cube of engex in his hand and five Decepticons clustered around him. Surely he wasn’t supposed to… Ratchet couldn’t expect this of him. This close to all of them, the modifications to his processor rattled and piped up: _wouldn’t it be great to be whole again?_ His tacnet was busy building strategies around having five new allies. 

He was pretty sure thinking about being an unstoppable force went beyond the bounds of small talk. It was clear from the looks on the Constructicons’ faces that they were having similar thoughts. 

“I… have to go,” he said. 

“Aw, okay!”

“Come back soon, boss! Anytime.”

“Let us know if you’re planning anything, we’re just killing time--”

The feeling of being incomplete was slow to fade. 

* * *

Prowl retreated, at last, to the relative safety of the Autobot block. It was late enough that the halls were empty as he made his way to the mess hall. Ratchet had made it a point to remind him that consistently low energon intake could lead to fuel line degradation.

Someone was already sitting in the mess when Prowl walked in. He stopped as their head lifted and the rolling light of a visor landed on him.

“This is an Autobot settlement,” Prowl said, and knew immediately that that had been far from the right thing to say.

Jazz took a long drink, his visor dimming. “Last I checked, I wasn’t sportin’ purple just yet.”

“Yes, well. You’ve made it clear where you stand.”

“Oh, I’ve made it clear?” Jazz scoffed, waving a hand. It was then that Prowl noticed the cluster of cubes on the table in front of him. “Prowl, you--!” He stopped. Lowered his hand. “It doesn’t have to be like this, Prowl.”

Against his better judgment, Prowl crossed the room and took the seat next to Jazz.

“We could be okay,” Jazz continued, his vocalizer skipping a little on the consonant glyphs. “We could be, y’know, better’n this at the least _._ ”

“I don’t know how,” Prowl admitted. It felt like the first genuine thing he’d said all day. 

“Maybe start by not bargin’ in here all _this is an Autobot mess hall_ and _that’s Autobot engex_ , which, t’be fair, it is--” Jazz paused to take another drink. “But I’ve been told the _Lost Light_ is a neutral ship, even if the bartender’s an Autobot, so you can sort that one out.”

Prowl connected the dots. “You purchased that from Swerve?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“That might not have been wise.”

“Ah, shove off. Swerve’s alright. Can’t listen for slag, but neither c’n I and you like me well enough.” Jazz knocked his shoulder against Prowl’s. “Or you used to.”

“No,” Prowl sighed. “I still like you well enough.”

“Yeah?”

When he chanced a look at Jazz, there was a smile playing around his mouth. A sudden calm filled Prowl’s spark as he recognized the gentle hum on his plating as Jazz’s field. 

“Yeah,” he said. He shunted his tacnet processes to the background once again. “Sometimes it’s just not clear where to start.”

Jazz considered him. “Want to phone a friend?”

“ _Please_ ,” Prowl said. “Or Ratchet’s going to be on my back for a vorn.”

Jazz tilted his head at that, but let it slide. “Well, like I said, startin’ out with somethin’ a little softer is a good first step. Somethin’ like, say, ‘hey Jazz, how was your day?’ or ‘what nice weather we’re havin’.”

“I’ll try it out,” Prowl said. 

“Okay,” Jazz said, nodding, and shifted in his seat until he was facing Prowl. He raised his hand in a cheeky salute. “Well, hi there, Prowl!”

Prowl let the weight of the orn slide off of him. His tacnet popped in to report a 98.2% chance of success. 

“Hey, Jazz. How are you?”

**Author's Note:**

> now it's time to wait for (4/20)20 when prowl week absolutely blasts my chakras


End file.
